Fast forward one foreshortened hockey season, and there is no playoff joy in New Jersey, no Devilish moustaches to rival that of our own mascot, nothing to do but jeer the Rangers and wish for hope to spring eternal in Boston. I’m retiring Carter’s stache-site, and present my attempts to write under a more amusing “nom de stache.” At this point, I’ll do anything for a hockey laugh.

Better Than A Beard (May 26, 2012)

Hi, I’m Ryan Carter’s moustache, and I’m going to the Stanely Cup Finals. Who needs a beard when you can rock the upper lip like me? I’m the most famous 16 hairs in hockey.

I’m the Frosty the Snowman of the hockey springtime: here now, down the drain only when the time is right.

My Favorite Moustaches (May 26, 2012)

Best moustache on the team: NJ Devil, by a longshot. I mean, our mascot has a porn moustache that’s nearly 3 feet wide. Clarkson might be second.

Best moustache in hockey: George Parros, Anaheim Ducks. Long before it was fashionable, and he does good charity work. Makes me proud. Certainly the most erudite stache on ice.

Best LA Kings moustache: Wil Wheaton, Kings fan, actor and writer. Love that guy (I’m a huge fan of Eureka and the Guild, okay? Need to watch something on those cross-country flights).

Fear, Stick, and Poke (May 26, 2012)

What I’m afraid of: high sticks (need to shave to get stitches in there, ask Zubbie), Gillette, Shick and Norelco products.

What fears me: Are you kidding? Henrik Lundqvist is going to have bad dreams about my hirsuite heft in front of him all summer long. 4th line on the ice, first on the upper lip.

Christmas in May (May 26, 2012)

Two of them, actually.

May is the best – for me, it’s that time of year when you’ve survived the first round of the playoffs, you know you’re not going to be some short-term, hair today-gone tomorrow affair, but the real deal. A playoff beard for those making a statement, or incapable of making more facial hair. Either way, when the rest of the world is cleaning up for the beach or graduation or whatever other warmer weather pursuits entertain, I’m looking to go public. Not like Facebook, of course.

Close runner-up: November. Exactly six months away. Start of hockey season, when normally I’d be in hibernation, forgotten on the other end of vacation, camps, and early season predictions by The Hockey News that are completely useless. November is the more formal name for Movember, the annual campaign to raise awareness for prostate and other men’s cancers.

For me, it’s like Christmas in June, because May is more like Christmas. Henrique said that last night on-ice? Rook steals all my lines.

Kovy the Krank (June 1, 2012)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kovy is just hilarious, sticking a tab of smelling salts right there in front of me. I’ve never been shoved into a urinal cake, but you get the idea. Pungent stuff. Harsh. Tangy. Kind of like Josefson’s gear. You spend your whole existence under Carter’s nose, you pick these things up.

The practical joker on this team was Gomez. Never played with him, but he thought he was pretty funny when he tried giving Patty a haircut. Look where that got him — Gomez has no hair now and scored one goal in what, a hundred games? Not that I’m wishing anything bad on Kovy, he’s a good guy, and he’s here for the duration, but these little stunts go both ways.

I’m getting Master Carter to replace Kovy’s pre-game playlist with the very best of Verka Serduchka:

Jump, jump indeed – what goes around the bench, Kovy…..

One At A Time (June 6, 2012)

One game at a time.

One shift at a time.

One shot at a time.

One facial hair at a time.

The difference in Game 4? Henrique decided that I’m the epitome of power, and trimmed up to match up. And he scored another game winner.

Even The Fans Voice thinks I’m funny.

Brothers In Arms (And Lips And Hair) (June 7, 2012)

As a player, or at least part of a player for part of the season, I’m not supposed to “make friends” with the media. Unbiased communications and independent thought and transparency and other SAT words (hey, I know the SAT, I went to Minnesota State Mankato, or at least Ryan did and I made the rare appearance at a frat party…).

But I just love Tom Gulitti of the Bergen Record. He’s frank and funny and frankly funny most of the time. I wouldn’t mind having a locker stall next to his. If he could skate, that is. He’s like a rare combination of John Scalzi and, well, Bob Woodward. And he most definitely appreciates the finer strands of facial hair.

Must-read post-game commentary on Henrique following me to moustache-ville. Then again, if someone said highlighting your hair would bring luck, Henrique would do that too and then go score another big goal. Oh wait, that was Elias like five years ago. Both good guys, both came up big last night.

What I need to know is: Why isn’t anyone interviewing NJ Devil about his ‘stache? Right — he can’t talk, he’s the mascot. Like those body puppets in Disneyland but with a totally bad-ass attitude and cheerleaders who follow him around (so totally not LA it’s laughable). He started this whole thing in 1999, the year the Devils decided he needed to look more like Tom Selleck and less like a normal mascot.

Not Buying It (June 7, 2012)

Not hockey related. Mostly not.

A very hip Euro-bud (not Patty, Sykie, Zubie or anyone else wearing horns, k?) pointed me at a goatee shaving template. People are that spastic?

Then I thought about all of those Rangers fans leaving the Garden during the playoffs, and it kind of made sense — if you’re drunk enough, I guess a little plastic screen to keep you from looking like you were the subject of a frat prank is useful. And it probably prevents some folks from accidentally shaving off their noses, although the way the Garden smells, being nasally challenged might be a suitable win.

I Am Not Afraid (June 9, 2012)

I have no fear (mostly because I have no glands to generate whatever hormones are associated with fear, being made of hair, that is). But I have no fear of ending up in the wastebasket in my bathroom, or washed down the drain with some Barbasol. I am a bigger stache than that. Lo, though I skate through the San Fernando valley of overpaid acting talent and bad officiating, I fear not, because Gionta is with me (and he’s way bushier).

But seriously, the way people are carrying on about the 3-1 games advantage you’d think we were Napoleon planning to invade the KHL. The “1% chance of winning after 3-0″ and “9% chance after 3-1″ deficits are historical averages, not representative of a game played in the here and now. You can’t even look at it like a series of coin flips, hoping it comes up heads four times in a row. Coin flips are independent, the next doesn’t care about the results of the last (except in some weird sci-fi stuff that Zubie reads on trips to Canada, but that’s another story).

Successive hockey games are dependent trials. You win one, get the other guys off their stride, playing your way, making adjustments, and you improve your chances of winning the next. So if it’s 3-1, then it’s 3-2, guess what? 3-3 looks a lot more reasonable. One game, one period, one shift, one shot at a time.

Want to be afraid? If this series goes the distance, Game 7 will be made into the newest Hollywood horror flick called “Wednesday the 14th”. If Goon got to production, so can this one. I, of course, will have a cameo playing myself. Don’t tell Ryan that means I’m sticking around for the off-season. He’ll be afraid (and itchy).

Down The Drain (June 15, 2012)

“Ignominy” is such a great SAT word. Really is. And I even had a new definition for it: ending up in an interceptor pipe in Southern California, getting washed out with the sewage, loose hair and bad movie ideas that spring from the Hollywood Hills. Sigh. It was a great run, and I’m proud of my teammates for what we accomplished, as well as for truly appreciating the beauty of the singular stache when the playoff beard seems overdone.

To the fans: thank you for cheering until the last horn. For those of you (especially the ladies) who sported moustaches, I’ll only repeat what my mom said: Don’t do that to your face or you’ll look like that for the rest of your life. But stache-bearing fans are always welcome at our games. To Kevin Clark, the best arena announcer of any sport, I know my name doesn’t give you much to work with unlike a Zubrus or that eye-chart Kovulchuk, but thanks for belting me out with the pride and energy you bring to every day of your job.

July 1st I’m a free agent, but that’s a business for agents and laywers and GMs and other non-mustacioed people. I think this team has another deep run in it, and there’s nothing I would love more than to re-appear, Tony Blundetto like, on a moist April day in Newark. For now, kids, get those beach bodies in shape, forget about (hockey) life for just a little while, and don’t forget to wave those towels.

This is what I learned.

Leaving my host Ronit’s house in Mabuim, Israel, she pointed out her olive tree named Adi. Pomelo, lemon, and almond trees are known anonymously by their fruits; her olive tree has a name and so called it gets a touch more love from the family. When we know or assign names, we breathe life into their stories.

Our Greater Metrowest Federation Peoplehood trip to Ukraine and Israel began, for me, with the story and assembly of a differently branched tree. Cobbling together hopelessly short anecdotes shared by my grandmother’s generation, I traced my family tree five generations back to the Ukraine. They emigrated to the United States to escape pogroms and a rising German power that had already pushed the family east into Galicia. Piecing together the family history was an exercise in transliteration and trying to fathom what happened to those relatives noted only with a first name and a question mark. The further back I went, the less of a beginning there was to my story.

Window in the Odessa synagogue, converted into a basketball gymnasium during the Soviet era.

I found more subtle cultural clues about my family: An exhibit card in the Jewish museum shows “HaKohayn” spelled “KAGAN” in Ukrainian, and the spelling of a great-grandmother’s name comes into sharp focus. A plaque in the wonderful community center thanks a Rabbi Ezekiel, transliterated into Ukranian as “YE-KOZIEL,” and suddenly I know the answer to the 100-year old riddle of my great grandfather’s first name. He was known as “Koziel”, a diminuitive of that name. At the Odessa community center, we meet a dozen young Jewish people, a collection of Toumas and Katias who invite us into the private fold of their familiar, diminutive names, as we are part of the same, larger family.

From Odessa, it’s almost 500 kilometers north to Kiev, passing through alternating forests and farms. Most of the trees are the institial growth between cultivated land or small villages, but every so often we pass a rectilinear plot – a tree farm. I can see backwards three generations, the handiwork of men like great-grandfather Koziel, a treecutter who was forced to sharecrop because he could not own land in Yarmolints. The beginning of my story is there, too, carefuly encoded.

Memorial to the Jews massacred at Babi Yar, in the ravine just behind this menorah

We left Babi Yar as a group, walking away from the ravine, moved, saddened, and prepared to tell this story, too, from our vantage point in the middle. Despite a growing a sizeable Nazi Party, democracy in the former Soviet republic means that “Jew,” “Jewish” and “Judaism” are names that can be said aloud, no longer passed along through secret family recipes below the threshold of detection. As difficult as visiting Babi Yar was, it was empowering to leave, to walk away, with a Jewish tour group. Regrouping around the bus, I compared notes on small Ukranian villages with Jeremy, our Joint representative in Kiev, and it turns out he knows the archivist for Yaromlints. A century and a half, 7,000 miles by air and 12 hours in a bus, and yet playing Jewish geography still produces results.

Children’s Ukranian (from Hebrew) transliteration of daily prayers. Note the English “h” for the voiced “h” in “Ha-Olam”.

We left Ukraine for Israel to observe Yom HaZikaron, the day commemorating fallen soldiers and victims of terror attacks. Each ceremony mentioned “Am Yisroel” – the people of Israel – as the state is the place that is defended, but the people are what make it worth defending. Having seen the resurgence, and equally fragile nature, of the Jewish people in Ukraine over the preceding week, my personal sense of responsibility was amplified. Knowing Israeli officers who visit the families of their fallen soldiers makes the day more emotionally intense, building on the sense of community responsibility. We caught up with Ronit’s husband, an Army medical officer, later in the day. Ronit explained that he had led a ceremony, and then gone to see the family of one of his soldiers killed in the line of duty. There was no more discussion needed; we had spent a week understanding how sometimes the story cannot – and should not – be softened with explanation.

The soldier’s name was Adi and the olive tree is in his memory.

This week Michael (Mic) Robert Todd started a Live EP Kickstarter project to fund recording and production of a 5 or 6 song digital EP. This is the evolution of the music business — an established musician creating a very low cost product to stimulate interest from a new audience. Mic is better known as the former bass player for Coheed and Cambria, and over the last three years his life has been woven around his separation from that group he helped form, an arrest, addiction recovery, and fighting testicular cancer.

Someone famous once said that you can’t play the blues if you’ve never experienced loss. As a corrollary, I don’t think you can write folk music if you haven’t experienced the tribulations of “regular folk” in a modern context. Flux Fortuna, Mic’s latest musical venture is a folk/rock/blues eclectic mix that should appeal to fans of acts as diverse as Coheed and Cambria to Mumford and Sons. As he says in the Kickstarter video, these songs were written in hospitals, jail, and recovery houses. From the few songs I’ve heard, the emotional Vu meter is pegged somewhere around Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (which remains one of the most raw, under-rated albums of all time).

Why am I interested? There are four reasons: (1) Mic is the Bubba’s guitar and bass teacher, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him in person, over lunch, to talk about music, business and life. He’s a genuine working man putting things back together, and I have the greatest respect for his transparency and candidness in discussing his issues and personal growth to overcome them. (2) He has played the hand he’s been dealt since his arrest with a pretty singular strategy: get better and create an outlet for his musical talent. The past three years are the genesis of powerful song writing; Flux Fortuna is the channel; Kickstarter is the seed capital. (3) This Kickstarter campaign is constructed with the right segmentation of rewards: if you contribute between $7 and $25 (the typical contribution) you end up with the digital product (so you’re effectively pre-ordering it) with a small bit of “not available in stores” swag. It’s a perfect model for participation and rewarding early adopters. (4) Kickstarter is the right structure for emergent groups. While anyone with a Mac and some microphones can record a song and get it on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, professional musicians aspire for a higher quality production, and that requires some initial capital. The Kickstarter model for a digital EP removes the distribution fees, packaging costs, and marketing expenses in exchange for artist and audience self-promotion.

So I’m promoting, because Mic Todd’s story deserves a good ending. It’s not always the way folk songs conclude, but Mic isn’t typical folk.

Flux Fortuna on Facebook

Flux Fortuna on Twitter

Mic Todd on Twitter (where he laments that his fake testicle has a wider audience than his new band)

Flux Fortuna Live EP Release Kickstarter project, live for another 3 1/2 weeks.

Disclaimer: I have an epsilon-sized but non-zero financial interest in Flux Fortuna’s success, as a Kickstarter backer, the owner of the various domain names that I have contributed to the project, and in seeing a certain young bass player continue learning from a great musician.

It was the last day of Mites hockey, completing my first year as coach. It’s been deeply satisfying watching these young players progress through the year as players and teammates. I got to work with other coaches who donated their time and patience in copious quantities. We had an amazing group of parents who got their kids all over NJ, frequently before 8:00 am on a Sunday morning, and who cheered, supported and encouraged good sportsmanship in all the right quantities. As I thanked my team last week, after our last tournament game, it was a pleasure to borrow a few hours a week of their lives — as the saying goes, the days are long but the years are very short, and each hour shared with a sports program is a gift to be valued.

Watching the parents and their kids I was reminded of a weekend exactly a decade ago. Bubba was wrapping his second season of travel hockey, competing in a tournament in Lake Placid. With banners, t-shirts and Olympic ephemera reminding you of the Miracle on Ice and the emergence of a particularly American strain of hockey, it’s easy to wish for big things. We found ourselves competing in the bronze medal game; only the winner would take something home other than a lot of memories.

Bubba’s team lost in double overtime.

About an hour into our 5-hour ride home, with Bubba being quieter than usual, I reminded him that with tryouts coming up for the next season, he’d had a chance to “trade up” for jersey #26, the number-sake of favorite Devil Patrik Elias. I had been late to the game (literally) on the day jersey numbers were chosen, and Ben got a second choice. There are so few points of personal selection when it comes to jerseys – the team crest is something you work for; the name above your digits is given to you by heritage, but you get to pick the most obvious part of the design.

“I’m going to keep #8, Dad” was Bubba’s reply, “it’s my number now too”. As all twenty readers know, #8 has been “my number” since 1972 when I became a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell, and it has graced nearly every jersey for which I’ve had the honor of choosing the number. Of all of the moments of 10 years of club hockey and 4 years of high school hockey, from state tournaments to rivalries to the birth of long-term friendships, that ride home remains my favorite.

To quote Jodi Picoult, sometimes the miracle is the thing that didn’t happen.

Broadway has seen its share of shows built around songs, with character development wrapped around a book assembled from pieces, rather than in the other direction. Think “Movin’ Out”, “American Idiot” and “Mama Mia.” “Hardbody” goes in the other direction – it’s based on a documentary film about a real-world contest to see who could keep their hands on a pickup truck the longest. The characters are rooted in reality, the dialogue flows from their less theatrical existence, and the songs were written to make a musical rather than making a musical out of a song catalog. Even knowing two of the numbers going in, I was pleasantly surprised to see (and hear) how they moved the story along.

Hardbody goes against the grain of the classic musical, though, in that it doesn’t offer us escape from reality for three hours (as “The Drowsy Chaperone” reminds us one should). It’s a view into a dozen different American realities, as vivid and relevant in 2013 as they were in the mid-90s when the actual events transpired. What makes it work is that it’s an original story about American values – pickup trucks and contests – told through truly American-influenced music (where else can you hear a dobro, mandolin and pedal steel guitar on a Broadway soundtrack) – about that most American of values – love. Yes, it’s a love story, although the objects of affection involve people, deities, animals and of course, trucks.

Without spoiling one of the finer points of the show – it is possible to have top-notch choreography when nearly every scene involves people holding on to a truck. You have to see it to appreciate it. And go see it, soon, because it gets my early Tony vote for best book, best orchestration, and quite possibly best musical.

Or else the Devils are finally showing their age, their intensity, their capabilities, and their motivation.

At 2-5 in their last 7 games, and setting a record tonight for fastest goal-against (8 seconds? I can’t get down the ice in 8 seconds) I’d prefer to think it’s a bit of both. But coming up on the halfway point of the season, it’s time for the leaders to step up.

Kovulchuk and Greene need to make better passes.

Whatever is wrong with the penalty kill needs to exit by the Zamboni door, and quickly.

The big bodies need to fill in for Zubrus and Carter on the forecheck, and exercise some puck control.

Everyone needs to relax, simplify their game, and put more pucks on the net.

And I’ll add a postscript “poo poo poo”, with a red and black ribbon, to hit “undo” on my ken-a-hora.

Adam Larsson’s play on the game-winning goal in the Devils-Flyers game on February 15 exemplified every one of those tenets of system play. After being scratched for most of the late season last year, Larsson found himself in the 7 or 8 spot again this year. But some smarter and more reasoned play with the puck earned him a regular rotation, and then last night he showed his true horns: Puck is cleared along the glass, he gloves it down, snaps it through a forward’s legs toward a large-bore David Clarkson in the slot where it’s tipped in for the goal. Holding the blue line and keeping the puck in the zone, and snapping the puck with direction (rather than slapping it with force) turned a possible transition play into a scoring play. This is the kind of stuff you can teach, and if the players execute, you get consistent and consistently good results.

Want to see the flip side of this? Adam Oates had a miserable system for the Devils’ power play last year, and now that he’s aiming the Capital guns, they’re misfiring. Let your quality talent free lance within the bounds of a system, or else you spend most of the season looking up at the teams that do.

It’s a superb followup to “Little Brother,” and Cory’s found a good balance between technical exposition and moving the story along, with decidedly less snogging and more insight into the root causes of greed and corruption. It has what DJs call a “cold ending” – it hits a strong final note that resonates, without the need to play out every single chord, making it even more thought-provoking and open to personal adaptation.

It’s now on the top of my gift list for everyone, and I’ve referenced it twice this week in various meetings.

Alexi Ponikarovksy, known around here as “My Little Poni”, is a Devil again. We missed him. And he only helps with the surname scoring for “The Scrabble Line,” as I’ve started to call the various combinations of Zubrus, Zajac, Kovulchuk and hopefully Loktionov.

Devils-Flyers tonight at the Rock, and my prediction is that it’s a big night for Ryan Carter and Brian Gionta. Both of them should come with a warning “Objects in red jerseys hit bigger than they appear.”

It’s Hockey Weekend Across America, so wear your jersey, cheer your team on, and most of all, take someone you love to a game. It’s a sport best seen live. Your kids have heard those words before, anyway.

• Buy a hard drive, plug it into a USB port and call it “iTunes Library Mark II” (if you’re in a particularly This Is Spinal Tap mood). Create a top-level folder on it called “iTunes Extension” or something similar.

• In the Finder, navigate down to Your User Name > Music > iTunes > iTunes Music, and highlight the artist(s) you want to copy off to your overflow device.

• Drag and drop what you selected onto the “iTunes Extension” folder on your new external hard drive. This will take a little while.

• Make sure everything has copied over correctly; browse through the external drive and make sure the file sizes look OK, and that the copy operation has had time to complete.

• Open up iTunes, delete those artist(s) that you just copied out. iTunes will ask you if you want to delete the files, and say “Yes” to free up disk space.

• Empty your trash, so you really free up the disk space. This will take more than a few seconds.

• This is the important part. In iTunes > Preferences, click on the Advanced tab, and uncheck “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library.” If you don’t do that, the next step will copy everything back to your iTunes folder on your main/internal hard drive, and you’ll be awash in duplicate copies of songs, and out of disk space again.

• In the Finder, navigate to the newly created “iTunes Extension” folder, select all of your folders (all of the artists/albums you copied over), and drag and drop them into iTunes. You’ll see a popup showing you how iTunes is processing the new files, and iTunes will build new links to the external drive location.

• If you normally keep everything in your iTunes media folders, go back to “Preferences” and re-check the “Copy” option.

Now you have an iTunes library that’s organized as if it lived in one big happy folder, but is spread out over multiple devices. If you take a bit more brute force approach (delete the original songs from the Finder, which causes iTunes to update the file location to point into your Trash), or if you’ve had a few splits, moves and consolidations go awry, you may end up with “dead tracks” – they show up with an exclamation point to their left, and are songs that are cataloged in your iTunes library but don’t have a valid file location as their target. After powering through this split operation, badly, the first two times, I ended up with more than 1,200 dead tracks.

Tracksift is a $2 Apple AppStore fix that cleans up entries in your iTunes library that point into left field (or your Trash or anywhere else that you didn’t intend). It’s worth the cost to avoid having to do this clean up manually, plus it has a few other clever playlist management features.